Reply To: Questions regarding DPF.

[Rezwan]

Aeronaut wrote: So what are these cops going to do when Detroit figures out how to build 20M FFs/year and carbon emissions become a quaint non-issue?

This isn’t going to resolve anything for both sets of cops. Arguments are about positions, rather than needs. The GW folks will be relieved because FF plants will reduce emissions and allay their fears. But they will not concede that they had been wrong about those fears.

The GWDs who have been saying there is no problem to begin with, won’t be able to show that there was no problem – since to show that, you’d have to just let the status quo continue well past when the dire consequences predicted by GW folk would take place. So they will continue to assert that there was never any problem.

A working fusion reactor won’t prove anything in that argument either way. As such, the argument itself is effectively irrelevant to fusion.

Except…that brings up another issue: GW fears (right or wrong, who am I to judge) are very useful for the fusion community. It makes more strategic sense to leverage such fears to increase fusion funding, rather than dismiss them. Historically, fusion funding rises and falls with these sorts of panics. Weapons races, OPEC oil embargo, and now global warming.

It’s not about consensus, folks, it’s about coalition building (out of cantankerous people who tend to repel each other) for the purpose of directing the stream of pork to things you value.

Stay on mission, folks.